I’m rarely cheerful the day before a show. I wish I had a bit of Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s infectious, nitrous oxide enthusiasm to lift everyone’s morale—especially mine. But I always feel as if I am being led in front of a firing squad, and I seem to give birth to concerts only after a lot of labor pains. Today’s pains weren’t only metaphorical. On the car trip from Manhattan to Katonah, there was a four-car traffic accident that could easily have turned into a five-car one, were it not for Michael Barrett’s quick reflexes and presence of mind.

This program takes its inspiration from an opera — Mozart’s Cosí fan tutte — and a movie, Max Ophuls’ La ronde, which was based on the hugely controversial play by Arthur Schnitzler, Reigen. Both works are about the disruptive interplay of love and lust, fidelity and libido, id and superego. In our concert two couples meet and fall in love, but the honeymoon fades. Soon the guys feel trapped and the women feel betrayed, and then all hell breaks loose.

My goals today were simple and clear: to get the second half of the show staged, and to see if I could persuade my hands to stop behaving like bouncers at a second-rate strip club. I took a little time by myself at the piano in the morning to deal with item number 2. I […]

Unlike most of the directors I’ve worked with in the recent past, Stephen has not had a lot of experience with the demands—and limitations—of the concert stage. Song repertoire is not his wheelhouse, and he has not worked much with classical singers. All of this turned out to be an advantage, not a deficit. It seemed to allow him to see everything with freshness and imagination.

Yesterday was a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. But today I could see why Wednesday is known as “hump day.” I tried very hard to conceal my fatigue from everyone (including myself), with the clear intention of replicating the buoyancy of Tuesday’s session.

One of the luxuries of the Vocal Rising Stars program is that I am encouraged to invite guest teachers in to work with the cast. But it wasn’t easy to locate the right people for this crazy multilingual program. In fact, I wasn’t even sure what I needed—should it be another musician, a director, an actor, a language coach? Early in February I had a few wonderful prospects on the hook, but they got other gigs and had to bow out. And then I remembered a very moving conversation I recently had with Bénédicte Jourdois in the Juilliard lobby.

This is our tenth anniversary at Caramoor—which means it’s my eleventh season as Artistic Director of the Vocal Rising Stars Program. I look forward to these residencies with a mixture of anticipation and fear. The work is intense, and the week’s success depends a lot on the chemistry of the cast. Not only do they […]

After all that work and all my crazy anxiety, I am happy to report that the show went quite brilliantly on Thursday. The place was packed. The cast was on fire—seven vibrant personalities, set free in a way you don’t always see at my school. Mary Birnbaum’s staging (even the parts that had worried me) worked like a charm. And the song lyrics seemed to be clear—when I looked out into the house I saw that the audience did not have their heads buried in their programs. They were getting what they needed from the stage.

Dress rehearsal. This is usually when I have my worst day at the piano, when every ounce of grace and fluidity is replaced by gristly tendons and a rotating display of tiny memory slips. Imagine a light case of arthritis accompanied by a series of mini-strokes—that is how I experience it. Apparently it felt worse than it actually was today. I apologized to some of the cast members at the break and they said, “What? You’re sorry…? We didn’t hear anything go wrong. You sound perfectly fine.”

We had our first day in the hall today. This move is less disconcerting these days than it was when we started NYFOS@Juilliard in 2006. Going from a small room—in those days, my apartment—to the 1000-seat Peter J. Sharp Theater used to feel like a Great Disappearing Act, a kind of “Hey dude, whadja do with my SHOW?” Everything that had been vivid suddenly seemed tiny, everything that had been colorful suddenly seemed pallid in the larger space.